Biodiversity

Many of the most dramatic biological impacts of climate change are mediated by species interactions. Still, we largely ignore how climate change influences the way species interact, and how this affects community dynamics. Due to their steep climatic and ecologic gradients, mountains are excellent systems to study how species interactions will influence community dynamics in future climates. As part of my doctoral research, in collaboration with Loic Pellisier, and Jake Alexander, we transplanted pieces of alpine meadow to lower elevations in the Swiss Alps to investigate how climate change alters the performance of different species and the nature of the interactions among them.

Google Earth provides a freely available, global mosaic of high-resolution imagery from different sensors that has become popular in environmental and ecological studies. However, such imagery lacks the near-infrared band often used in studying vegetation, thus its potential for estimating vegetation properties remains unclear. In this study, we assess the potential of Google Earth imagery to describe and predict vegetation attributes. Further, we compare it to the potential of SPOT imagery, which has additional spectral information.

For the last 20 million years, volcanic activity in south-central Mexico has created a geological mosaic that shapes the patterns of structure and diversity of the vegetation across the region. In El Tepozteco National Park, just a few miles south of Mexico City, oak forests cover a complex geomorphological landscape composed of eroded lahars and lava flows of different ages and degrees of soil development. For my Bachelor research thesis, I described the patterns of oak forest diversity and structure across this geomorphological mosaic, analysed its relation to landscape-scale environmental heterogeneity, and studied the potential of analysing Google Earth satellite image attributes to model and predict vegetation properties.